“When a boy at Kinghorn, late and early he might be seen either putting his tackle in order, or down on the beach digging for bait, or on the rocks, now on one and now on another, according to the state of the tide, contented to spend hours and hours together so that he only caught fish or even got what he called good nibbles. On many occasions he was so successful that he was able to keep the poor pretty well supplied with fish during his visits.
“It was not only during the holiday months that William occupied himself in fishing or in preparation for it. All through the winter he and his brothers spent a good deal of their time in manufacturing lines for the next summer’s campaign. It is amusing to remember where materials for these fishing-lines sometimes came from. There was an old piano in the house which had seen better days, and the strings of it afforded a good supply of wire for fastening the hooks on the lines; the tail of any horse unfortunate enough to come in the way was put under contribution for a supply of hair. To the end of his life, his interest in and his love for Kinghorn never waned; and by the occasional visits he continued to pay, his acquaintance with the few remaining companions of his boyhood was kept up.
“The second last visit he paid was in 1886. My sister Jessie and I were with him. Leaving Edinburgh early in the day, we crossed to Burntisland; and getting a carriage there, we drove to Pettycur. His recollections were all of his boyhood. He showed us a part of the beach where he used to dig for cockles and sand-eels, and the rocks where he and his companions made a fire to roast potatoes. He pointed out the place where Alexander III. is said to have been killed; and recalled the old times of pinnaces and open boats before steamers were heard of. Leaving Pettycur, we drove to the loch, a lovely, sequestered place, where William caught his first pike. To show his love for fishing, my brother Tom recalls the fact that on one occasion, when the holidays were over and the day had come for William to return to Edinburgh, after he had finished his preparations for starting, he looked at the clock, and saying he had still time to run up to the loch before the boat sailed, rushed off with his fishing-rod. Whether he came back with an empty basket or not tradition does not say. From the loch we made our way to the beautiful sandy beach; then up to the Braes, where he used to scamper about, and on which there still stands an old hawthorn tree, by the side of which, he told us, he fired his first shot. He loved evidently to linger in memory over these days and recall his friends and playmates, the remembrance of whom brought tears to his eyes.”
CHAPTER III.
SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMATES.
WILLIAM Nelson was a pupil in the High School of Edinburgh when one great cycle in its history was completed. It had occupied the site of the old Blackfriars’ Monastery for upwards of two hundred and seventy years. In 1555 the town house of Cardinal Beaton, at the foot of the Blackfriars’ Wynd, which continued to be one of the most interesting historical buildings in Edinburgh till its demolition in 1871, was rented by the city for the use of the Grammar School, while a building for its permanent occupation was “being biggit on the east side of the Kirk-of-Field,” the scene, a few years later, of Lord Darnley’s mysterious assassination. Its rector was David Vocat, a prebendary of the neighbouring collegiate church of St. Mary-in-the-Field; and under his rule the cloisters of the Dominicans, built for them in 1230 by Alexander II., gave place to the halls and playground of the High School boys. But it was a turbulent age, and before the century closed the Yards became the scene of a tragic event which retained a prominent place among the traditions of the school so long as it remained on the old site. In 1598 Bailie Macmoran, one of the city magistrates, was shot in a barring out of the schoolboys by William Sinclair, a son of the Chancellor of Caithness. The contemporary diarist, Birrel, notes that “there was ane number of scholaris, being gentlemen’s bairns, made a mutinie;” and on the poor bailie interposing, the schoolboy revolt ended in dire tragedy.
Great as were the changes that time had wrought on the locality where the old monastery of the Black Friars gave place to the City Grammar School, a flavour of historic antiquity pervaded it to the last. The episcopal palace of the Beatons, where the school work had been carried on for a time, still stood at the foot of the High School Wynd; and near by was the site of that of Gawain Douglas, who, while still provost of St. Giles’s collegiate church—
“In a barbarous age
Gave to rude Scotland Virgil’s page.”
It was probably due to the vicinity of their lodgings that the poet interposed on behalf of the militant archbishop when, after the famous street feud of “Cleanse the Causeway,” Beaton had vainly sought sanctuary behind the altar of the Blackfriars’ Church, and, but for the interposition of the poet, would have been slain. His vigorous translation of the Æneid into the Scottish vernacular was a favourite with William Nelson in later years. But the associations of the locality in his school days were for the most part of more recent date.
The High School Yards had been the playground of Hume, Robertson, Erskine, Horner, Jeffrey, Cockburn, Brougham, and Scott, and of many a notability before them. The memory of its gentle, scholarly rector, Dr. Adam, author of “Roman Antiquities” and other works, was still fresh; and the old school seemed a link between past generations and the living age. But neither the site, with its picturesque surroundings, nor the building, accorded with the ideas of civic reformers who had organized a crusade against whatever was out of keeping with the brand-new town. The age had not then reverted to the mediæval models which have since come into vogue. Classic art was regarded as most suited to academic requirements; and so a beautiful Grecian building—the finest specimen of Thomas Hamilton’s architectural skill, in the designing of which his artist friend, David Roberts, was understood to have contributed valuable aid,—had been erected on the southern slope of the Calton Hill, as a more fitting home for the city Grammar School.
The migration from the antiquated building at the head of the High School Wynd to this splendid edifice in the New Town was an important change in many ways besides the mere removal to more commodious and sightly halls. It brought to an end a host of old customs and traditions; and, among the rest, to the hereditary feud between the Cowgate “blackguards” and the High School “puppies.” A grand civic ceremonial marked this transfer of the school to its new domicile. On the 23rd of June 1829—a bright, auspicious day—William Nelson, the head boy of his class, with his schoolmates, under the leadership of the rector and masters, walked in procession, each bearing an osier wand, with music, military escort, and all the civic glories that the Lord Provost and magistrates could command, to do honour to the occasion. It was a memorable epoch in schoolboy life. But it seemed to the old boys as though they never were quite at home in their stately New Town quarters. Old “Blackie,” with her famous “gib” or toffy stall, was out of place there; and as for Brown’s famous subterranean pie-shop in the old High School Wynd, it necessarily tarried behind, to the inevitable ruin of a once flourishing business. Not the building only, but the entire scholastic system carried on within its walls, soon after underwent a complete revolution; and the work of the venerable Grammar School of Prebendary Vocat, the classic arena of Adam, Pillans, and Carson, has since devolved on Fettes College, a creation of the present century.